The Blog

“In 10 years, AI will be as exciting as electricity is to us today. You walk into a room right now and you don't even have to switch the lights on. AI will be like that. AI will be an obvious part of our business processes. You wouldn't want to run a business without it” Michael Natusch, Prudential. Today saw RE•WORK hosting the Deep Learning in Finance Summit, Deep Learning in Retail & Advertising Summit and the AI Assistant Summit, bringing together some of the leading global minds working applying these technologies in multiple industries.

At Focal Systems, we believe that there will always be a place for brick and mortar retail, particularly in the grocery space. Customers want to touch and smell fresh produce, to personally select health & beauty aids, to explore new products, and they want the instant gratification of being able to run into a store and buy what they need. A study by Rutgers University shows that consumers spend 6 times more in brick and mortar stores than they do online, and 78% of shoppers prefer buying in stores vs. through the internet. This explains why offline retail still makes up 90% of total retail purchases globally, or $20 trillion dollars!

Artificial intelligence is being applied in retail across the whole product service cycle from targeted marketing, product recommendation, customer service interactions, and customer lifetime value. With the Deep Learning in Retail & Advertising Summit fast approaching, we're taking a look back at some of our speakers from the event last year. Already confirmed to join us in London this March 15-16 is Dima Karamshuk, Senior Data Scientist from Skyscanner, Changtao Shong, Data Scientist at Twitter, Sam Lloyd, Group Analytics Manager at Travis Perkins and many more.

Christmas shopping may be over, but I wouldn’t say no to boxing day sales! Having said that, no one wants to be stuck in a queue outside in the freezing cold at 6am, and I don’t know many retail employees who look forward to the sales. We’ve taken a look to see how AI and deep learning are helping retailers manage these busy periods and assist them in optimising their efficiency and save money all year round. Who had multiple Christmas parties this year? Finding one outfit is bad enough, let alone several, and who has the time or money for a personal shopper?

In the spirit of Black Friday & Cyber Monday we're offering 25% off passes to all upcoming summits when you register using the code CYBER25. The offer is available from today (November 22nd) until next Wednesday (November 29th).
The discount is also applicable on the already discounted Super Early Bird and Early Bird passes, giving a massive double saving!

As traditional high street shopping takes a back seat in retail and e-commerce continues to lead the way, online marketplaces such as eBay and Lalafo continue to grow and further establish their place in the industry as consumers become more and more comfortable buying products from third party suppliers. Whilst eBay is the world's ninth-largest internet company by revenue, the market size is increasing with consumer demand and competitors are thriving with similar platforms.

How many times have you been shopping online, filled up your basket and abandoned your purchase? This could be due to countless factors - you’re over budget and can’t decide what to get rid of, you were just browsing, you’re out of time, or you’re just overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choice on the website. E-commerce platforms are desperately trying to overcome this problem by serving personalised and targeted adverts based not only on your previous browsing history but on countless factors and data sets they’ve collected whilst you’ve been on their website. Both retailers and search engines are facing the challenge of an abundance of choice and to break through this and encourage purchases requires adverts to be deployed.

For millions of us around the world, ordering a pizza using Siri, or asking an online chatbot for help on a website isn’t anything we’d think twice about. As technology companies have developed and perfected these products, coexistence with AI assistants is something we’ve quickly adapted to. For other industries however, there wasn’t a such a definite use case for AI back in it's early days, but companies that fail to adopt the technology now will soon get left behind.

If I were to describe a fictional person, place or object right now, the chances are that you would be able to evoke an image of my description in your mind's eye. I could also suggest variable features of the item which would cause you to imagine different versions of the object. This seemingly simple task however, poses several challenges for machines.
At the Deep Learning Summit in London last week, we heard from Andreas Damianou from Amazon who shared his recent work on improving the functionality of machines in scenarios of probability and uncertainty through applications of deep learning.